Ballmer’s racist remark circa October 21, 2003

In a conversation with Mark, he highlighted an almost 3 year old comment by Ballmer which goes: “… Should there be a reason to believe that code that comes from, how do I say this, a variety of people unknown around the world somehow will be of higher quality than people who get paid to do it professionally? There’s no reason to believe it will be higher quality. I’m not going to claim it necessarily will be worse quality. Bu why should code that may get written randomly by some hacker in China and contributed to some Open Source project, why is its pedigree by definition somehow better than the pedigree of something that is written in a controlled fashion? I don’t buy that.”

His racist comment that one should not trust a person from China to contribute code is really not something that should not be left alone – and the fact that it is still on MS’ site is amazing (they are usually good at spin doctoring, but looks like this has not been a target yet). He has been disparaging about open source software relative to his monopoly and he has shown that he will not stop at anything and will be racist as well.